I've been taking a look at Anki (0.3.6) recently, and had been considering switching from Mnemosyne, but I noticed some weird scheduling problems (or at least I would call them problems) when I was messing around with it.

After importing my Mnemosyne deck, while all of the cards seem to have reasonable due dates (taken from the .mem file I presume), scheduling after the next review seems hit or miss. Some of the cards are OK (that is, the new interval choices look reasonable), but for many of the cards the initial "1 day, 3-5 days, 7-9 days" interval choices show up. Cards that I created a month ago in Mnemosyne and haven't missed for multiple iterations are treated as if they're new cards.

I've also had a similar problem with a deck created entirely in Anki. After choosing "Make Due" for a card in the Edit Deck dialog, the new interval choices are reset to initial "1, 3-5, 7-9" as well. I understand that increasing the interval on a card that was reviewed prematurely could be dangerous since you didn't have to wait as long before you reviewed it, but surely the interval doesn't need to be completely reset (note that I didn't choose "reset progress").

Are these things abnormal? I'm running it on Windows XP if it makes a difference.

Thanks to anyone who can help with this.

Edit: After looking at the import feature a bit more closely, it seems that my first problem is just due to the fact that Anki treats all of the "recognition" cards as new when importing a deck from Mnemosyne. Furthermore, I'm not seeing the second issue come up now for some reason. Either I was doing something wrong, or restarting Anki fixed it.

I do have one quick question though, is the Make Due option the only way to prematurely review cards? I don't actually use the feature much, but Mnemosyne has the option to keep on going after the session is done. Is there any easy way to do this in Anki?

Server crash or down?

Server was fine, but the router is unreliable. I'll have to buy a new one soon.

Tumulu: "Make due" is is useful for undoing a schedule if you accidently answer a card before you wanted to. There is no "study ahead" feature in Anki - it's completely against the concept of spaced repetition. The Mnemosyne author doesn't recommend it, but he put it in anyway. I don't see why.

If you find yourself with time on your hands, why not add more material, or do something fun in the target language like reading a book?

Back to the whole "deck order" versus "card interval order" issue, I just thought of a pretty good reason not to use "deck order" (assuming that means what I think it does - the order cards were added to the deck, right?). Anki has these nice randomized intervals so that cards added in groups get spread out over time and don't get reviewed together. If you accumulate a stack of expired cards, though, you start re-forming these clusters again.

This happened today, and I think it happens to me a lot. I used to think it was just coincidence! It's counterproductive too - if I add a pair of closely related facts at the same time, the second one tends to get reviewed less effectively since I often review it right after getting a little hint.

By default, each fact you add is put in a random place in the deck.

Weird. Maybe it is a coincidence then!

If one card is in position 50 of the deck, and the other card is position 100, and nothing is due in between them, then the cards will appear one after the other. I'd put it down to coincidence. Sort of deriving some elaborate method of spacing similar cards (which would be almost impossible to do usefully from a user-interface perspective), the occasional occurance of one card that gives a hint to another is inevitable. Anki at least prevents multiple sides of the one card from appearing too close together.

Is the deck order the default sort in the Edit Deck window? The default field is "Back", but that field doesn't exist...

You have a model with no cards. If you go into the deck properties and delete the model, 'back' should stop appearing. :-)

I asked earlier what happens to a card when it is suspended? Does the due date get frozen, or does the clock continue to tick? Any answers?

wynterp Wrote:I have a question about the suspend function. What actually happens when a card is suspended? Is it frozen in its current due date (for example: due in 3 days), or does the clock keep ticking, but it just doesn't show up in my reviews until I unsuspend it? I have never used this, so I don't quite understand it. Do you have to suspend cards individually, or can you do a whole section or deck? I was just wondering if the suspend fuction could be used on the whole deck as a kind of pause.

The clock keeps ticking on cards that you suspend. You can suspend a large group of cards at once by selecting them all in the Deck Edit window, right clicking, and giving them the "suspend" tag. You can unsuspend them the same way.

i originally disabled the reverse card creation option as im doing AJATT style reviewing i.e. japanese to english only. However i think after i updated anki it got enabled again and im coming accross the reverse of my recently created cards. I tried going to edit to change them but i couldnt. How do i go about changing this??? anyone know??

Edit Menu -> Deck Properties -> Models tab

This would just be icing on the already fantastic Anki cake, but I was thinking that some from of migration tool would be useful. Occasionally, I may realize that I experienced some shortsightedness when designing a card model. In this case I can just add another field to my model and I would love to be able to import a file that contained the information for just that field. In the same vein, I think a way to migrate a card from one model to another as well as add custom models to the "What would you like to study screen" could also be handy. I am not sure there would be any demand for these features, and indeed I can get by without them. I just figured it couldn't hurt to ask.

It's me again. I noticed something today and I just wanted to make sure that I was not making a mistake. Prioritizations are not supported when reviewing online, is that correct? Is that on the plate for the future?

Please double-check. They should be supported.

Re a migration wizard, it sounds pretty complicated from a user interface perspective. Furthermore, it's trivial to script if you learn a few lines of python - I imagine people could bumble their way through if they had an example to base things on.

For example:

>>> from anki import Controller
>>> ds = Controller.DeckStorage()
>>> deck = ds.load(u"tango.anki")
>>> for card in deck:
... if u"人" in card.fact['Expression']:
... print card

OK, I have my deck with a set of unseen cards "Cloze Exercise" in the low priority field. From the Anki desktop app they show up after all other new cards are seen, the way they should be. But unless I suspend them they show up on the web site before 80 other new cards that I have. I will send you my deck and you should be able to reproduce the effect by just suspending and unsuspending the "Cloze Exercise" cards.

EDIT: You may have to clear a few cards that are due.

The low priority stuff is not working on your local deck either - it's just the different deck order which makes it look like it is. The problem is you spelt it 'close' in the 'low priority tags' and 'cloze' in the actual tags :-)

Well that would explain it, as I said I wanted to make sure I wasn't making a mistake and I was. I will try to dig a little deeper next time I promise.


What do you mean by different deck order by the way?

The order of the cards on the server and your local machine is not guaranteed to be the same. It's difficult to ensure a certain order when changes can be made on both ends at the same time, and there's not a huge amount to gain by trying

hi resolve,
i made the query before about how to switch from production to recognition and you kindly told me to do this:

Edit Menu -> Deck Properties -> Models tab

and i disabled production.

The problem is it didnt change the existing cards i made as they still keep coming up the wrong way round. Is there an opition im missing?

its ok i sorted it out... didnt realise it created two versions for the cards - one for production and one for recognition. Went through and deleted the production ones.

Thanks

Router again?

yep

Server down.